of bathos takes us to the secret of Wordsworth, or talking about maniacal construction and characterization takes us to the secret of Dostoevsky.  There is no use pretending that the methods of these writers are good because their achievements are good.  On the other hand, compared with the marvel of achievement, the faultiness of method in each case sinks into a matter almost of indifference.  Mr. Masefield gives us in Dauber a book of revelation.  If he does this in verse that is often merely prose crooked into rhyme—­if he does it with a hero who is at first almost as bowelless a human being and as much an appeal for pity as Smike in Nicholas Nickleby—­that is his affair.  In art, more than anywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end of Dauber is vision—­intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision.  Here we have in literature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on his inexpert canvases:—­

                                     A revealing
    Of passionate men in battle with the sea,
    High on an unseen stage, shaking and reeling;
    And men through him would understand their feeling,
    Their might, their misery, their tragic power,
    And all by suffering pain a little hour.

That verse suggests both the kind and the degree of Mr. Masefield’s sensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea.  His is the witness less of a doer than of a sufferer.  He is not a reveller in life:  he is one, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides of anguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar of beauty or heroism.  He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the spiritual pain of the world.  He communicates to us, not only the horror of humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, “cut to the ghost” by the polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship’s doom, having been

             ordered up when sails and spars
    Were flying and going mad among the stars,

How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm, as the ship gets nearer the Horn: 

All through the windless night the clipper rolled
In a great swell with oily gradual heaves,
Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled,
Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters: 

            Like the march of doom
    Came those great powers of marching silences;
    Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters: 

She bayed there like a solitary hound
Lost in a covert.

Morning came, bringing no release from fear: